shooting stars and satellites
by itnevergoesout
Summary: Because everyone knows by now of James Potter, the boy who cannot love, and Lily Evans, the girl who simply won't.


title from death cab for cutie's masterpiece "passenger seat". reviews make the world go round xx

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Shooting Stars and Satellites

The first time Lily finds him, she needs to be saved.

Because nobody warned her about the girls, teeth sharp and elegant, hair and eyes in a million shades of dark. The boys, yes, because boys are the ones who are dangerous, who lead girls like Lily to enter pitch black bars with pocketknives tucked into skintight jeans or tall leather boots, in case a wand isn't good enough. It's the boys who are trouble, who try to take what they aren't given, play with pretty little things they do not own.

But it's a girl, a shockingly beautiful one despite her cold black eyes. They glittered though. Like coals. Lily noticed their matching fire and tried to make a move, and then it went too fast and too far, fingers and tongues and those terrible, terribly cruel eyes, all where they shouldn't have been without permission, until Lily remembers her wand, choking, fumbling and managing a stream of breath in the shape of a Stupefy.

She's shocked when it works, and it wakes her momentarily, sends her scuttling through the deserted alleyway the girl had coerced her to, hands scrabbling for a doorknob to anywhere and then she's in a pair of arms and it should be uncomfortable, drive her to panic after what just happened to her, but it's warm, and soft, and safe.

Those arms are loosening and she feels her breath catch, but he's still here, wiping callused fingertips along her cheekbones, removing the wetness pooled in the hollows and making way for more.

Lily hadn't realized she was crying.

She looks up, and there is James Potter. They haven't spoken in over a year, not out of enmity, but from a sheer coincidence that borders on indifference. They certainly weren't friends then, and they have no reason to be friends now. School starts again next week, her final year, with the promises of new parchment and textbooks and a gleaming Head Girl badge.

She had come into Diagon Alley with the girls in the early afternoon, the four of them moaning over the tragedy that was their last ever pre-Hogwarts shopping outing. They had split up after a few hours, Alice to find Frank, Mary to be fitted for new dress robes, Dorcas because she was fed up with Lily's shrieking.

And that was how Lily had found herself in The Phoenix Feather, a swanky new pub straddling the borders of Diagon and Knockturn Alleys. It was safe, she reckoned as she waved at a few Hogwarts acquaintances, and she could really use a good butterbeer. The interior was beautiful, all crushed velvets and deeply stained woods, and as she flirted with the barkeep and swirled golden butterbeer through her lips, she felt normal for the first time all summer. Like herself. Like she was home.

But then there was that girl…

She had seemed almost soft at first, perched on a barstool with two girls she said were her sisters. The brunette glanced at the blonde knowingly, and they scooped up their drinks and made for a table somewhere in the back. One minute it was gentle, the next a snake-like voice was scraping at her skin like untrimmed fingernails. _Dirty. Mudblood. Scum._

She doesn't mean to tell James, but the name comes rushing out from her lips like it's alive: Bellatrix.

He only clutches her tighter.

…

And with that, an awfully strange friendship has begun, one people would have whispered about if only they had the crucial facts the two of them kept hidden like a treasure. Lily, a tiny firecracker of a girl who could, without notice, become a woman who slept with anyone who would consent. James, a lanky but graceful boy, perpetually surrounded by the carefully batted eyes of his many admirers, eyes he didn't- couldn't- notice were directed at him. The bi girl and the ace boy, inseparable. The sort of pair that would begin a story, or a joke.

…

It's only because they're on speaking terms now that she can pay him back when he's reached a low. It's not something he can explain, this vague feeling that settles itself in his chest every so often. He is reluctant to call it loneliness, when he has not only Remus, and Peter, but a friend as desperate and present as Sirius Black. But. He longs for something he knows he doesn't need. The look in Sirius' eyes as he sneaks a glance at Marlene. The smile that creeps across her mouth when she catches him. Initials doodled onto parchment and stolen lipstick kisses and-

He loves, his Marauders and his parents and his precious broomstick, but he doesn't _love_.

Lily finds him slumped at a table in the library, potions text open. Amortentia. She gently tugs on his hand, pulls his unprotesting self to the Head's office. They end up squashed on the sofa in the corner of the room, James' head in Lily's lap, Lily's fingers delicately playing with the hair spilling across her thighs. "Why can't I do it?" he asks in an anguished voice, and Lily sighs, because she knows this isn't a question about potions, about precision in measurements and counter-clockwise stirs. "It's not that I didn't smell anything- there was grass from the Quidditch pitch, the parchment my mates favor, my Mum's blueberry scones." He stands now, agitated, pacing, a reckless form of energy. "I'm not meant to marry my Mum," he says angrily, pulling at his hair so viciously that Lily winces from pain on his behalf.

And suddenly Lily is looking at him differently, with thinly disguised fondness and hope. She presses herself into his chest, feels his arms instinctively curl around her. "You have me," she whispers so that he doesn't hear.

She shouldn't be making these promises, not to a boy like James, but still she says it again, in a voice she knows he cannot make out. _You'll always have me._

…

They are the type of mates who only see the very best or the very worst of each other, and are inexplicably closer because of it. The first time they share a moment, both of them buried deep inside their heads from a combination of sadnesses, it is a snatch of time spent sitting on a grotty floor indoors somewhere, legs unconsciously tangled together, backs up against a wall. They split a cheap bottle of wine and a cigarette, and it is blessedly silent until James is ready to speak. He plucks the cigarette from her mouth, nearly burnt down to the filter, and gracelessly takes a breath. "Sometimes," he says in a slow exhale, "I really hate people."

In a voice coated in melancholy and ash she replies, "I always hate people."

It is quiet, and it is still, but more than that, it is shared.

…

The next time it happens, they're slightly better prepared. James nicks a bottle of his father's finest firewhiskey from the cellar when he returns from yet another dull event thinly disguised as a fundraiser for St. Mungo's. The amount of girls thrust into his direction by his mother would have led him to believe the charity was nothing more than a front for a brothel. Lily finds him in fetal position in the hollowed wall behind the carving of Erdrich the Eccentric on the fourth floor, a fifth of the bottle already slipped down his long throat. She gingerly sets herself down beside him, pulling a few packets of crisps from her rucksack and discarding them on the stone floor. Comfort food. "My go," she says hoarsely, and when James ignores her, she tugs the bottle out of his weak grip, pours a healthy amount into her empty belly.

Tonight it's family they have in common, a sister who has banished Lily from her upcoming wedding and a father who has admitted that James is unnatural and needs to be fixed. Lily's still wearing her dress, a pale green frock that reminds her of Christmas elves, and James mutters a feeble "looking good" in her direction. She waves it off, takes another long drag from the whiskey. They continue to sit in tense silence, passing the bottle back and forth like a grenade about to explode. An imminent row is fogging up the cramped space, only they're too entrenched in their wallowing to see.

"You should have heard Petunia tonight," she starts viciously, stuffing crisps into her mouth and spitting crumbs all over the hideous dress her sister picked out for the wedding.

Mint green made her skin look blotchy and her hair look like blood. Good riddance, she thinks.

"Just because I tried to hit on one of the bridesmaid's sisters," she continues, crumpling the empty packet with a loud crunch and tossing it into a corner. "A freak, Petunia calls me, says I'm spoiled for trying to have the best of both worlds. Like the magical and Muggle worlds don't intersect. It's not my fault girls are so shattering-looking." She pauses slightly before adding, "and some boys as well," giving James a slight poke.

His expression doesn't change. "It could be worse," he says darkly.

Maybe it's the alcohol, maybe it's the fight she didn't have with Petunia simmering in her veins, but Lily is instantly on her feet, eyes burning with rage. "Yeah? Please, tell me more, oh enlightened one. Tell me about spending days praying not to be murdered and nights looking for someone to hold and mornings hoping they haven't run away and left you behind for good. Don't you dare tell me about worse, you privileged prat."

Now James has stood up, towering over Lily's tiny frame with a frighteningly cold anger seeping from him into the air around them. "Guess what, princess? The same things threatening to kill you- blood, family status, political affiliations- are going to kill me just as messily. I turn 18 next month. 'You're ready to marry,' my father tells me this evening, as my mother introduces me to girls who are supposedly beautiful, wearing frothy dresses and far too much makeup. And I'm meant to choose one, start a family. I panic, meet my parents in my father's library and explain that I can't."

Swallow, breathe, begin again.

"I tell them, and it doesn't matter, because I have a family name to pass on, a legacy to uphold. I just haven't met the right one yet is the answer to a question I never asked. My blood is just as much trouble as yours. You'll have aurors to watch out for you, and once your sister is married, she'll ignore your dating life. So you have options, okay? I haven't got anywhere to run."

Lily is fuming now, spitting out phrases like _how dare you_ and _you don't understand_ and _I will never belong_. She seems to grow an inch with each one. Before long her words run out and she simply lifts a hand to slap him on the arm.

The small space between them crackles with energy, with fire.

"It doesn't have to be a competition," James finally says, spent, slumping back to the ground, and Lily snorts, because she's seen James on the Quidditch pitch, ruthless, cunning, a boy who is neither humble in victory nor gracious in defeat. James offers a sheepish smile in return and the tension is broken, leaving behind a beautiful night for two friends stupid drunk and halfway in love.

…

They're somehow perfectly in sync, emotions always magically coordinating so that they will simultaneously laugh or cry or smack at the castle walls from some combination of anger and terror. And it terrifies Lily, because she could have anyone. She can spend a night in their bed and a life in their heart and it would leave her unscathed.

But this boy, with his chaotic hair and smudgy smile and innocent jokes, is a mystery to her. They don't want in the same way, and she fears that difference is their sole incompatibility. The only thing keeping them apart.

She wants to tell him she loves him and mean it, but they've abused the word, turned something sacred to a joke, because the two of them don't love. Lily lusts, challenges, conquers, and disappears. James professes his love for everything from treacle tart to Lily's new shoes, feigns attraction to every inanimate object, any girl with a pulse. It's brimming with humor, the word love, because everyone knows by now of James Potter, the boy who cannot love, and Lily Evans, the girl who simply won't.

She sighs just as James enters the Head's office and takes his place beside her. He dumps a sheaf of papers- detention forms, from what she can make out- onto the table in front of him and rests an elbow beside the stack. "Alright, Evans?" he asks. It comes out earnest, like he really does want to know if she is okay, and her last defenses fall so that the words come out in something like a gasp: I really want to kiss you.

So James looks at Lily, really looks, at the freckles that tiptoe from one cheek to another via her too-small nose, the lips that are perpetually chapped and stained slightly red from lipstick, the ridiculous green of her suddenly bashful eyes. He doesn't feel a thing.

So he thinks, instead, of her tender hands holding his in the midst of a violent thunderstorm. Her voice singing him her favorite lullaby when he cannot sleep, sweet even with the slight creaking at the higher notes. The rumble in his chest of the first laugh she coerced from him after a particularly bleak and lonely day. The riddles he tells that make her forehead scrunch up in concentration, and the brightness that envelops her face when she figures the solutions. These are the intangibles that make up Lily Evans, and something inside him stirs. "Okay," he croaks, a little nervous. "I s'pose you can."

The kiss itself doesn't feel like much; it's a little slippery but not unpleasant, and pretty much what he expected. But suddenly, there are all these feelings blooming inside of him, happiness and excitement and the slightest tinge of anticipation, feelings Lily has pressed into him through her lips.

Somehow their emotions are always in sync.

He doesn't say the word love, but he thinks it, wonders if four letters can possibly be vast enough to contain a dictionary of actions, and expressions, and stories.

It might take time, but he hopes one day it will.


End file.
